Linux advocates have for so long advocated browser-accessed software as a service as a way to break out of Microsoft's proprietary desktop. Now that this world has arrived, there's less incentive to work on native Linux apps.

I keep telling it every day, but somehow it seems most enterprise applications are moving to web only interfaces and with it the trend is comming to the consumer applications as well.

For enterprise apps, it's *extremely* convenient to do it that way. A lot of those apps have their roots in ancient "green screen" apps - once used via a genuine dumb-terminal, later via some sort of terminal emulator under Windows.

And when you have a software company with a lot of experience developing under Unix systems and clients with a lot of experience running those same systems, then adding a Unix-based web layer on top of those apps is the obvious way to go. The first step is probably a collection of Perl CGI scripts that screen-scrape the old terminal app, and which over time evolve into something more sophisticated. This kind of thing is probably a big part of why Java was so successful as a server language - it came out at just the right time for companies looking to replace their old green screen apps.